Some time ago, our partner for Three-network data SIMs informed us that the service would be ceasing at some point partly due to the end of 3G. Shortly after, they announced a replacement service via their own mobile network. A&A has worked with them on the development of this new service, and it is now in the late stages of testing.
The upside of this is that there will be more direct control and oversight over the mobile aspects of the service. The “home network” of the new offering is directly owned by our partner, with the SIMs roaming onto other networks. There is also the potential for us to reduce the pricing on data at some point in future, which was not possible before.
There is a downside too, however: SIMs will need to be swapped.
We anticipate this needing to be done before the end of the year, and now the new service is almost ready for production, we are working on a seamless migration process, whereby customers of the old Three-network SIMs can be sent replacement cards 1:1 and manage the swap themselves; with all settings, IP addresses, etc. migrated across seamlessly. We will be emailing customers in due course about this, once plans have been solidified.
We apologetically announce that we will be raising the price of our SIP number services. This difficult decision has been brought about by the increase in support burden for these services, mostly because of the rise in their adoption by migrations from old PSTN lines from the Openreach exchange closure programme.
Support of lesser-technical users who have been forced to migrate, and then need help setting everything up makes it difficult to make the service – originally conceived and priced expecting only highly technical users - profitable, and as many people are reliant on it, we want to make sure it is sustainable so that we can continue to operate it into the future.
We hope this makes sense, and that the transparency of our explanation counts for something. We feel that our service is still extremely good value at the new pricing level, and we have discussed this with a number of existing and potential (new) customers who indicate that it is still something they would use.
Tin/Silver/Gold/etc numbers will see the same 30p rise, and setup fees will remain static.
We do try and never raise prices – and have never done an “inflation plus” type rise as many providers in our field do every year. We are giving this notice now so as not to surprise people with a short notice announcement.
If you’re new to VoIP, we have been updating our VoIP handbook to give an overview of our service: https://support.aa.net.uk/voip-handbook
Almost all our customers who took both OpenReach WLR3 copper line and broadband over the top from us are now migrated to SOGEA. This has largely been done without interruption, and only a small change to the items on the invoice will have been noticeable to customers. These migrations were the lowest hanging fruit since A&A has never offered PSTN services for telephony.
To more expediently migrate customers whose lines were with TalkTalk Business (now known as PXC) we made the decision to migrate them to BT Wholesale. We are about halfway through that process. Interestingly many of those who were on ADSL for FTTC have been able to gain true fibre to the premises (FTTP) as a result of this, so have received an improvement to their services.
Progress continues, but the remaining base to be migrated require slightly more work and liaison with end users, since most of them involve a separate PSTN provider and may require number porting/VoIP services and equipment.
